Wednesday, April 27, 2005

Bannings: A note from Wizards R&D

Good afternoon, D&D Minis People.

First, Apologies

You may have noticed that new Floor Rules went up yesterday and got changed today. The timing and content of the version that went up yesterday weren’t intentional. Yesterday’s floor rules were posted without being reviewed, which was why they banned the Sandstorm tiles when we had no intention of banning those tiles.

We’d also intended to review the new Floor Rules with our netrep and with Customer Service and to introduce them with a web article. But no. The Floor Rules showed up first.

So here’s some explanation of the change.

D&D Miniatures Rotation Policy

Organized Play depends upon a certain amount of turnover in the play environment, so that early miniatures occasionally clear out to make space for new releases. After soliciting feedback from D&D Miniatures players, we have opted against retiring entire sets. Instead, our policy will be to go through old sets that we could have banned and select a small number of specific miniatures to retire from the Organized Play environment.

The following single miniature is henceforth banned from Organized Play:

• Drider Sorcerer, Giants of Legend 44/72 .

All other miniatures from Harbinger, Dragoneye, Archfiends, Giants of Legend, Aberrations, and Deathknell remain legal in Organized Play.

The point of this version of the rotation policy is to keep nearly all miniatures legal for Organized Play. We have no intention of banning large numbers of miniatures.

The Drider Sorcerer has been singled out for banning because of a combination of problems. No single factor would have led to the ban.

Our chief problems with the Drider are that…

a) Its abilities have an extremely negative impact on one-hour tournament play, often slowing games by making them extremely cagey.

b) The play dynamics of its super-tricky abilities are at odds with the flavor of its faction.

We could have issued errata to revise the Drider Sorcerer’s abilities. But we’ve already done that once. We went the wrong way with our earlier errata. So this time around, we decided to settle the matter cleanly, removing the Drider Sorcerer from contention.

Experienced players will note that there are a great many other powerful creatures in the game. And we only chose to ban this one. Our ultimate goal is to let players continue to play with their minis. If we’re lucky, the D&D Miniatures Rotation policy mentioned above won’t ever have to remove other minis from play. If there are other minis that are rotated out after a tournament season, it will be because we feel that their effects on the tournament environment are too unhealthy to be tolerated. But it won’t happen often, and it won’t happen lightly.

--Rob Heinsoo
D&D Miniatures Lead Designer

Originally posted on the Wizards boards: http://boards1.wizards.com/showthread.php?t=420104